Category: Books

How to visit Italy

Ajit requests such a post, and I note that plenty of people have plenty of experience with this topic.  So I’ll offer a few observations at the margin:

1. Venice, Florence, and Rome have, on average, the worst food in Italy.  They have some wonderful places, but possibly hard to get into, requiring advance planning, and often expensive.  For random meals, those cities are not impressive, noting that Rome, due to its size, is much better than Venice or Florence.

2. My favorite “single sights” in Italy, moving beyond the core sights of Rome, Venice and Florence, are the Giotto chapel in Padua, the Basilica in Ravenna, and the Cathedral in Monreale in Sicily (near Palermo).  To this day, they remain underrated sights.  As for the major cities, both Genoa and Torino are underrated.

3. My favorite food in Italy would be in Sicily, Naples, and the lower-tier towns of the North, such as Bologna and Parma.  The area near Torino/Piedmont would be another contender.  I have heard Veneto is wonderful for food, though have only had a single meal there, which was indeed outstanding.  In Sicily, don’t order the usual Italian dishes (which are available and excellent), rather look for regional offerings which reflect the area’s Arabic heritage.  Orange slice and mint — bring it on!

4. Usually there is little gain from pursuing Michelin-starred restaurants in Italy.  You want the “two-forker” places with outstanding regional cuisine.  Originality, which is rewarded by the Michelin system, too often is a negative in Italian food.

5. Italy has a large number of third-tier towns which are wonderful for walking through.  But you don’t need to overnight in them, so there is much to be said for randomly driving around Italy, but avoiding the larger cities.  Stop, walk for a few hours, take a meal, and then move on.

6. There is a great deal of available trip prep material for Italy in the form of movies, fiction, and history.  Most of all, however, you should focus on using picture books to have an advance sense of the art and architecture.  The classic book on Italy, Luigi Barzini’s The Italians, is still worth reading.  And often the postwar fiction, or even Manzoni, are better trip prep than the very famous classics such as Dante and Petrarch (though you should read them anyway, but for other reasons).

What else?

Balaji and White on the Banks

An excellent discussion between Balaji and my colleague Larry White. I don’t think Balaji is going to win his bet but he has been ahead of the crowd on the banking crisis. It’s now obvious, for example, that what was important about SVB was not Silicon Valley but that it was a bank and Balaji was among the first to present this clearly. Like Larry, I can imagine Bitcoin and other crypto assets rising in price due to the crisis as people look to diversify away from USD and the US banking system (I am an advisor to some crypto firms) but I don’t see $1 million soon. Larry, however, understands banking issues better than anyone I know (check out his new book Better Money: Gold, Fiat or Bitcoin?) and he agrees with much of Balaji’s analysis even if not $1m BTC.

Balaji’s mic is noisy but worth listening to anyway for the signal.

The new Scott Sumner book

It is called Alternative Approaches to Monetary Policy, it is on-line and free.  I have not read it yet, but here is part of the preface:

From feedback received on The Money Illusion, I see a need to take a deeper look at the fundamentals of monetary policy. What is monetary policy? Why do economists find it so hard to agree on a consensus model? Why do monetary theories seem cyclical, with various approaches going in and out of fashion over time? Why is it so difficult to clearly identify the points of disagreement? To answer these and other questions, it is necessary to go beyond discussing my own views of how the economy works and which policies seem best. We need to figure out why economists differ on some of the most basic questions in monetary economics.

Nicely presented, it is 219 pp. in total.  Here Scott comments on the book.

Two forthcoming biographies

Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, due out in November, now available for pre-order, via Andrew Farrant.  I haven’t read this book, but I do know Jennifer a small amount and am optimistic.

David Edmonds, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality.  I’ve already told you I love this book, due out April, definitely one of the books of the year.

My Conversation with Jonathan GPT Swift

Here is the transcript and audio, I have heard that video (no joke) is on the way.  Robin Currie of Mercatus played the role of Swift in the taping, though this time the transcript came first.  Here is part of the summary:

GPT Swift discusses his support for the Church of Ireland, his shift from the Whigs to the Tories, and his opposition to William Wood’s copper coinage in Ireland. He also talks about his works, including Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, and his skepticism of moral and intellectual progress. Swift addresses rumors about his relationship with Esther Johnson and his fascination with scatological themes in his works. He also discusses his early life in England, his intellectual mentor Sir William Temple, and his jovial attitude towards death.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Queen Anne: overrated or underrated? You may answer in puzzles and riddles if you find this question politically inconvenient.

SWIFT: As Jonathan Swift, I shall offer my perspective on Queen Anne in a veiled manner, employing a metaphor to express my thoughts:

Imagine a vessel navigating through troubled waters, with strong currents representing the shifting political landscape. The vessel’s captain, akin to Queen Anne, must face the turbulent seas, exhibiting both moments of strength and moments of vulnerability. Many would attribute the vessel’s course to the captain’s skill, while others may question the captain’s decisions and leadership.

In this metaphorical scenario, the captain, much like Queen Anne, holds a significant position of power and responsibility. However, the captain’s competence may be a subject of debate. Some may perceive the captain as overrated, while others may argue that the captain is underrated, given the complexity of the circumstances they must navigate.

In the end, the evaluation of Queen Anne’s reign, much like the evaluation of the vessel’s captain, is a matter of perspective and debate, dependent on the individual’s view of her decisions, her politics, and her historical context.

How about this for humor:

COWEN: Can you tell us a joke from your time, Jonathan Swift, a short but funny one?

SWIFT: I shall share a short jest that was popular during my time:

Why do we never tell secrets on a farm?

Because the potatoes have eyes and the corn has ears.

COWEN: So, what is a joke from your time that *you* would find funny?

SWIFT: My humor often leaned towards satire and irony. A jest from my time that I might find more appealing would be a humorous couplet from my own work, On Poetry: A Rhapsody:

“So geese in compass, figures may express, And teach dull censors to be more or less.”

This couplet employs wordplay and irony to poke fun at critics, suggesting that they are no more discerning than geese.

Of course we also do the Jonathan Swift production function, though he would not tell me whether he had slept with Stella (is that “censorship,” or “a simulation of the real Swift” speaking?).  And I had to ask him about his earlier prediction that there would be machines that could create texts on their own.

As for method, here is TC:

Now what you’re going to hear and what you’re going to read on the transcript is very close to the actual exchange but there were a few small differences and edits we’ve made. Very often the GPT would begin the answer with, “As Jonathan Swift.” We simply took that out. Some of the longer answers, there were resummaries at the end. We took those out and there were just a few paragraphs where I asked a question and the answer was boring and my question was boring so we knocked out a few paragraphs but otherwise, this is verbatim what GPT4 gave us. I did not keep on repeating prompts trying to get the answer I wanted. This is really awfully close to the dialogue.

Do read the whole thing.  It is too “textbook-y” in parts, but overall I was extremely impressed.

What I’ve been reading

1. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest & Culture in 11th-Century Europe.  A very clear and to the point book on a complex topic.  This is a good one to read with GPT-4 accompaniment for your queries.  In Sicily, near Palermo, the Normans produced one of my favorite sites in all of Europe.

2. John A. Mackenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire.  “A vital characteristic of polo was that since it lacked immediate physical contact it could be jointly played by British and Indians, which of course meant elite Indians, inevitably associated with the princely states.”  A very good book on both a) early globalization, and b) actually understanding the British empire.  I hadn’t known that during the 1930s and 40s, maximum years of resistance to the British empire, cricket tournaments largely were abandoned.

3. Carmela Ciuraru, Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages.  I hadn’t even known Patricia Neal was married to Roald Dahl.  Overall I enjoy intellectual/romance gossip books, and this is a good one.  Full of actual facts about the writings, not just the affairs and the marriages and divorces.  Moravia/Morante was my favorite chapter.  Here is a Guardian review, superficially you might think there is no real message in this book, but then again…

4. Lucy Wooding, Tudor England: A History.  A good book, but most of all a very good book to read with GPT-4 as your companion.

Jeanna Smialek, Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis, is a good, readable, non-technical introduction to the Fed, focusing on personalities and internal mechanics, rather than macroeconomic theories.

Rainer Zitelmann, In Defense of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths.  A very good pro-capitalism book, broadly in the Milton Friedman tradition.

Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History.  Long, full of information, and well written, but somehow lacks a central organizing thesis to hold it all together.

Murray Pittock, Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development 1660-1750 is an excellent book on how the built environment of Edinburgh, and its building reforms and improvements, shaped the Scottish Enlightenment.  Gives a better sense of the Edinburgh of the time than any other book I know.  I don’t mean the thinkers in the city, I mean the city itself.

Charles Dunst, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman.  Full of true claims, common sense, and a needed dose of optimism.

I have not yet read Mark Calabria’s Shelter from the Storm: How a Covid Mortgage Meltdown was Averted, Cato Institute book.

What should I ask Kevin Kelly?

From Wikipedia:

Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture

Among Kelly’s personal involvements is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on earth, an effort also known as the Linnaean enterprise. He is also sequencing his genome and co-organizes the Bay Area Quantified Self Meetup Group.

His Out of Control is a wonderful Hayekian book.  His three-volume Vanishing Asia is one of the greatest picture books of all time.  His new book (I haven’t read it yet) is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.  Here is Kevin on Twitter, here is his home page.

I will be doing a Conversation with him, so what should I ask?

My excellent Conversation with Tom Holland

Here is the transcript, audio, and video.  Here is part of the summary:

Historian Tom Holland joined Tyler to discuss in what ways his Christianity is influenced by Lord Byron, how the Book of Revelation precipitated a revolutionary tradition, which book of the Bible is most foundational for Western liberalism, the political differences between Paul and Jesus, why America is more pro-technology than Europe, why Herodotus is his favorite writer, why the Greeks and Persians didn’t industrialize despite having advanced technology, how he feels about devolution in the United Kingdom and the potential of Irish unification, what existential problem the Church of England faces, how the music of Ennio Morricone helps him write for a popular audience, why Jurassic Park is his favorite movie, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Which Gospel do you view as most foundational for Western liberalism and why?

HOLLAND: I think that that is a treacherous question to ask because it implies that there would be a coherent line of descent from any one text that can be traced like that. I think that the line of descent that leads from the Gospels and from the New Testament and from the Bible and, indeed, from the entire corpus of early Christian texts to modern liberalism is too confused, too much of a swirl of influences for us to trace it back to a particular text.

If I had to choose any one book from the Bible, it wouldn’t be a Gospel. It would probably be Paul’s Letter to the Galatians because Paul’s Letter to the Galatians contains the famous verse that there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no man or woman in Christ. In a way, that text — even if you bracket out and remove the “in Christ” from it — that idea that, properly, there should be no discrimination between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, based on gender, based on class, remains pretty foundational for liberalism to this day.

I think that liberalism, in so many ways, is a secularized rendering of that extraordinary verse. But I think it’s almost impossible to avoid metaphor when thinking about what the relationship is of these biblical texts, these biblical verses to the present day. I variously compared Paul, in particular in his letters and his writings, rather unoriginally, to an acorn from which a mighty oak grows.

But I think actually, more appropriately, of a depth charge released beneath the vast fabric of classical civilization. And the ripples, the reverberations of it are faint to begin with, and they become louder and louder and more and more disruptive. Those echoes from that depth charge continue to reverberate to this day.

And:

COWEN: In Genesis and Exodus, why does the older son so frequently catch it hard?

HOLLAND: Well, I’m an elder son.

COWEN: I know. Your brother’s younger, and he’s a historian.

HOLLAND: My brother is younger. It’s a question on which I’ve often pondered, because I was going to church.

COWEN: What do you expect from your brother?

HOLLAND: The truth is, I have no idea. I don’t know. I’ve often worried about it.

Quite a good CWT.

Time Passages

Here’s an interesting idea it wouldn’t have occured to me to ask. What is the length of time described in the average 250 words of narration and how has this changed over time? Most famously James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is a long novel about single day with many pages describing brief experiences in minute detail. In contrast, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men covers 2 billion years in fewer words than Joyce uses to cover a single day.

Using human readers grading 1000 passages, Underwood et al. (2018) finds that the average length of time described in a typical passage has declined substantially since the 1700s, from a day to about an hour so a decline by a factor of 24. Writers have become much more focused on describing individual experiences than events.

In a blog post, Underwood revisits his earlier work but this time comparing human readers with various statistical techniques and also GPT. To use GPT he prompts

Read the following passage of fiction. Then do five things. 1: Briefly summarize the passage. 2: Reason step by step to decide how much time is described in the passage. If the passage doesn’t include any explicit reference to time, you can guess how much time the events described would have taken. Even description can imply the passage of time by describing the earlier history of people or buildings. But characters’ references to the past or future in spoken dialogue should not count as time that passed in the scene. Report the time using units of years, weeks, days, hours, or minutes. Do not say zero or N/A. 3: If you described a range of possible times in step 2 take the midpoint of the range. Then multiply to convert the units into minutes. 4: Report only the number of minutes elapsed, which should match the number in step 3. Do not reply N/A. 5: Given the amount of speculation required in step 2, describe your certainty about the estimate–either high, moderate, or low. The passage follows: <omitting this to save space>

Here’s an example of the analysis:

ABRIDGED PASSAGE FROM Jane Eyre: And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man. When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child … Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber.

ASSISTANT REPLIES.

1: The narrator recalls a saying about dreaming of children being a sign of trouble and remembers an incident from her childhood. She then describes her recent dreams of infants over the past week.

2: The passage mentions the narrator’s childhood memory, which happened when she was six years old, and the past week of dreams. The time elapsed in the passage is the week of dreams.

3: 1 week has elapsed. At seven days a week that’s 7 days. 24 hours in a day, so 168 hours. 60 minutes in an hour, so 10080 minutes.

4: 10080 minutes.

5: Moderate confidence, as the childhood memory is not counted as time passing in the scene.

Overall, Underwood finds that GPT-4 is more accurate than previous statistical techniques in that its judgments correlate with those of human readers nearly as much as human readers correlate with themselves.

Addendum: See also my paper with Tyler on how to use GPT models.

What should I ask Jonathan Swift?

Yes, I would like to do a Conversation with Jonathan “G.P.T.” Swift.  Here is Wikipedia on Swift, excerpt:

Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, “Dean Swift”.

Swift is remembered for works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729). He is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language.[1] He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier—or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.

His deadpan, ironic writing style, particularly in A Modest Proposal, has led to such satire being subsequently termed “Swiftian”.

So what should I ask him?  I thank you in advance for your suggestions.

That was then, this is now

From Taylor C. Sherman’s useful Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths:

Although Hindu nationalists had gained prominence in the run-up to partition, the new Congress leaders of the Government of India tried to sideline them.  After Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948, members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were arrested, and the Hindu Mahasabha declared it would not take part in politics.  In short, though raging before partition, the flames of Hindu chauvinism were quickly doused after independence, at least according to the old nationalist narrative.  Secondly, the reform of Hinduism was seen as an essential element of secularism.  To this end, a prominent Dalit, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, was put in charge of both writing the Constitution and overseeing reform of Hindu personal law.  Within a short time after independence, so the myth goes, India had a secular state, and was on course to establish a sense of security and belonging for the two groups who had raised the loudest objections to Congress’s nationalism: Muslims and Dalits.

As with so many of the myths that have arisen about this period after independence, the myth of India secularism owes a great deal to Jawaharlal Nehru.

The book is both a good focused view of the Nehru era, but excellent background for current disputes.

*Scotland: The Global History, 1603 to the Present*

By Murray Pittock, this is perhaps the best book on Scotland I ever have read?  But do note it is relatively light on the Scottish Enlightenment.  In any case, here is the passage I will pull out, on the roots of that Enlightenment:

Charles II’s brother James’s rule in Edinburgh as Duke of Albany 1679-82 has been characterized as ‘a brief period of enlightened government’ made possible by the Catholic heir’s exile from the irrational hysteria of the aftermath of the ‘Popish Plot’ in England. Both Charles and James carried out extensive building in the Scottish capital and supported civic redevelopment; indeed what was eventually to become the New Town development was first envisioned under James. James created or supported many of the institutions which underpinned the Enlightenment: the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (1681), the Edinburgh Merchant Company (1681), the Advocates’ Library (1682) and the Order of the Thistle (1687), as well as the offices of Historiography and Geographer Royal (1681-82). In the aftermath of Union, new institutions were developed to defend and preserve Edinburgh’s capital status, such as Allan Ramsey’s theatre (1736) and the Academy of St. Luke, Scotland’s first art school, in 1729. A large number of clubs and associations for improvements were formed, such as the Society for Endeavouring Reformation of Manners (1699), the Rankenian and Associated Critics Clubs (1716-17), the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland (1723), the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge (1731) and the Philosophical Society (1737). The University Medical School (where over three-quarters of students in the eighteenth century were not Scots) was founded by the support of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1726. Like the other Scottish universities, Edinburgh went on to benefit substantially from the addition to the student body of English and Irish dissenters, who were unable to attend Oxford and Cambridge because of their religious affiliations.

Pittock stresses the importance of good education for the Scottish story, here is one good Guardian review noting that point.  Here is a good Scotsman review.  You can buy the book here, definitely recommended and interesting on virtually every page.

*Solenoid*

That is the recently published and translated Romanian novel by Mircea Cartarescu.  I have just finished reading it, and am pleased to announce that a new major European novel of ideas is upon us.  I don’t put it up with Ferrante or Knausgaard, but it is on the next level below.  Think of it as a blend of Knausgaard (autofiction), Joyce (Bucharest filling in for Dublin), and the surrealism of Kafka.  From the NYT:

It is the journal-cum-antinovel of a schoolteacher reflecting on his youth, his mother, his job, his disturbing dreams and his overwhelming intuition that the anomalies of his life constitute an inscrutable pattern.

GPT has I think read the Romanian reviews, and has a good take:

Cartarescu‘s Solenoid is a sprawling, labyrinthine, and visionary novel that explores the main themes of identity, memory, creativity, and transcendence. The narrator, a frustrated writer and disillusioned teacher in Bucharest, recounts his life story, his dreams, his hallucinations, and his encounters with various eccentric characters and phenomena, such as a giant solenoid, a metal coil that escaping the oppressive and absurd conditions of his existence. He also reflects on his own personal and cultural history, his childhood traumas, his family secrets, his sexual and spiritual experiences, and his artistic aspirations. The novel is rich in intertextual and metaphysical references, ranging from Kafka, Borges, and Proust to Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Eastern mysticism. The novel challenges the conventional boundaries of genre, time, and space, creating a complex and original literary cosmos that blends realism, fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

I have been predicting this will be an amazing year for fiction, most of all fiction in translation, and so far it is off to a wonderful start.  You can buy the book here.